4th-Grade 'Paleontologists' Discover 11,500-Year-Old Mastodon Hair

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Earlier this year, Linda Azaroff's fourth-grade class received a
2.2-pound (1-kilogram) box containing what one student described
as a "clump of dirt."

But this wasn't just any dirt — it was sediment, or matrix,
collected from a backyard in Hyde Park, N.Y., in 2000, where a
project to deepen a backyard pond uncovered the remains of a
mastodon —
an extinct elephantlike animal. Working under a deadline, but
not wanting to miss any important pieces, excavators carted away
about 22,000 pounds (10,000 kg) of matrix from around the bones,
more than they could realistically sort through in the years to
come. [ 25
Amazing Ancient Beasts ]

The excavators turned to citizen scientists volunteering for the
Mastodon Matrix Project, which enlists school classes, hobbyists,
families and other volunteers scour the matrix from mastodon
excavations. Since 2008 alone, more than 3,500 participants from
around the U.S. have worked on matrix from Hyde Park.

"One of the huge limiting things form a scientific standpoint is
we often don't have the staff time either from interns or
scientists themselves to go through all of this stuff," said
Carlyn Buckler, an education and outreach associate at the
Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), which operates the
Mastodon Matrix Project. "The more data we can get, the more
complete a picture we will come up with about the environment."

This approach isn't unique; students and other citizen scientists can
contribute their time and effort to a variety of projects, from
recording road kill to counting stars. In return, volunteers
get hands-on experience with science and the chance to contribute
to real research projects.

Fourth-grade paleontologists

Now the fourth-graders at Landisville Intermediate Center in
Pennsylvania had a chance to become paleontologists, and they had
plenty of expectations about what they would find in the matrix.

"I thought we'd find some teeth," said Ian Stringer. "I thought
we were going to find some small bones and wings of a butterfly,
maybe," said Nolan Deck. "Plants or leaves and sticks," said
Melissa Grube.

The matrix arrived with a set of instructions that guided the
class through the same basic process — such as sifting through
samples with their fingers and toothpicks — professional
paleontologists would use as they searched for bits of the
11,500-year-old mastodon along with shells, twigs, seeds and
other fossils. The finds were weighed, bagged and returned to PRI
in New York.

A fourth-grade class doesn’t typically have the most
sophisticated scientific equipment, but the students were armed
with plastic magnifying glasses.

"We found these tiny shells that were swirly and white," said
Caitlyn Cazad during a Skype video interview with LiveScience.
"Some of them would break easily."

"I found a big stick, it looked a little like a root, it had
little things coming off it," said Jack Reichler.

A memorable find

The students all agreed on their favorite find: an 8-inch long
hair that turned up in Elliot De La Torre's matrix. He described
it as black and really stiff.

"It could not have been a human hair," he said.

All of the students examined the hair, which had been embedded in
the soil, through their magnifying glasses and found that it did
not resemble human, dog or cat hair, Azaroff recounted. The
conclusion was unavoidable: It came from the mastodon.

"The children felt they had touched and handled
something that was thousands of years old," she wrote in an
email.

Others have found hairs in their matrix samples, however, few
have been positively identified as a mastodon's, according to
Buckler. It's possible the hairs could have come from a number of
mammals living at the time, she wrote in an email.

Once PRI receives sorted samples, researchers further identify
what they have found, naming twigs or shells by species, for
example. Everything is catalogued and some items join a reference
collection from the excavation. Researchers with questions about
life or the environment during this time can look to this
collection for answers.

An assessment of 36 samples returned from citizen scientists
found that, after some additional sorting and corrections, the
volunteers turned up similar results to those that
paleontologists would find. The researchers found the abundance
of finds in broad categories — such as total
mollusks — varied depending on students' recognition of
objects, their thoroughness, and, most likely, how they processed
the samples. But within the broad categories, the abundance of
specific types of organisms — such as types of freshwater
mollusks — appeared consistent, both among most citizen scientist
samples and with professionals' work on similar samples.

Part of the goal of the Mastodon Matrix project is to give
students and the public an opportunity to scour the dirt and
attempt to answer open-ended questions about its content, just
like scientists. For Ms. Azaroff's class, the experience appeared
to have left quite an impression. Half a year after returning
their sample, the students remembered their work vividly.

"The hardest part was probably actually seeing the stuff,"
because it's so tiny, said Ben Henry. "The best part was trying
to figure out what things were there because I really never saw
those things in my life before," said Diamondli Lopez. "I liked
it when I got dirty," said Kyle Luong.

The Mastodon Matrix Project — which uses samples from three
excavations — began in 1999 as a collaboration between PRI and
Cornell University, after the excavation of a mastodon in Chemung
County, N.Y., that fall.